James Simon Kunen is an American author, journalist and lawyer
Education
He attended Columbia University during the 1968 student protests and participated in the student sit-in at the institution"s Hamilton Hall, resulting in his arrest for trespassing. Afterward, he graduated from the New York University School of Law and moved to Washington, District of Columbia, where he became a public defender.
Career
He is best known as the author of The Strawberry Statement, a first-person documentary of the Columbia University protests of 1968. James Simon Kunen was an alumnus of Phillips Academy. This experience led him to write The Strawberry Statement, documenting the university"s controversial involvement with the government"s Institute for Defense Analyses.
After graduating from Columbia, he became a field journalist from Vietnam for TRUE magazine.
This experience led to his second published work, Standard Operating Procedure. His experiences in criminal courts led to his writing "How Can You Defend Those People?", which was published by Random House in 1983.
After leaving the Public Defender Service in Washington, Kunen worked as an editorial page editor at Newsday on Long Island before joining PEOPLE magazine as a writer and editors His coverage for PEOPLE of the nation"s worst drunk driving crash spurred him to write his fourth book, Reckless Disregard: Corporate Greed, Government Indifference and the Kentucky School Business Crash.
Kunen has also written articles for The New Yorker, People, Newsday, and New York Times Magazine, among other notable publications.
After losing employment with Time Warner as Director of Communications, after working with them for two decades, he wrote a book called "Diary of a Company Manitoba: Losing a Job: Finding Life," published in January 2012.